Mike Lawson - The Inside Ring

DeMarco did know one small thing about Emma. He had asked the Speaker to run a background check on her shortly after he met her. DeMarco was guessing she was CIA, something Mahoney should be able to confirm easily. Or so DeMarco had thought.

When the Speaker got back to DeMarco, he was as flustered as DeMarco had ever seen him.

‘She’s ex- DIA ,’ Mahoney said.

The Defense Intelligence Agency was formed by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara after the debacle at the Bay of Pigs in 1961. Some said it was the organization the CIA wanted to be when it grew up. Not only was it so competent that it rarely made the papers but it was involved in military operations so sensitive and so vital that even ranking politicians feared to challenge them.

‘When I asked about her, my buddy said he’d get back to me. Next thing I know I got two guys in my office so fuckin’ scary I almost soiled my britches. They wanted to know how I knew her name and why I was askin’. Me. The Speaker. Anyway, after I do a song-and-dance routine like goddamn Fred and Ginger, they finally tell me she’s ex-DIA – and I think the ex part might even be bullshit.’

No kiddin ’, DeMarco had thought.

‘But that’s all they’d tell me, Joe,’ Mahoney said. ‘Whatever she used to do for them is something they wanna keep buried until the Potomac dries up.’

But that was enough for DeMarco: to know the one thing about Emma that explained why Emma never explained.

The sound of a dump truck landing on the bar next to DeMarco’s right elbow startled him from his reverie. It turned out not to be a dump truck but Alice’s purse, fifteen cubic feet of fake leather filled, apparently, with everything she owned.

Without acknowledging DeMarco, Alice signaled to Mr William. He approached tentatively. Mr William was a gregarious person who enjoyed his patrons; Alice was the rare exception.

‘Black Jack on the rocks, string bean, and make it snappy,’ Alice said.

‘Yes, ma’am,’ Mr William said. It’s difficult for a man six foot six to cower but Mr William managed.

‘You know,’ Alice said to DeMarco, ‘since you knew I was coming and you know what I drink, you coulda had my drink waitin’ for me.’

‘Like your liver would shut down if you got your evening booster shot five minutes late.’

‘Don’t be a smart ass.’

Mr William delivered her drink then backed away like Michael Jackson doing his moonwalk.

‘Hey,’ Alice yelled at him. ‘No peanuts? None of them little goldfish things?’

‘I’ll get you some, ma’am,’ Mr William said, his face wooden, his eyes bright buttons that warned of impending homicide.

Alice was fifty, with dyed blonde big hair, too much makeup, and twenty pounds she didn’t need. She had a husband she referred to as ‘that asshole’ and a son she called ‘that little jerk.’ Alice lived for only one thing: the slot machines in Atlantic City, a mecca she pilgrimaged to every weekend. She worked for AT&T.

Alice slugged down half her drink and then began to rummage through her bottomless purse. ‘Here,’ she said, dropping six wrinkled pages on the bar in front of DeMarco: Billy Mattis’s phone records for the last three months.

Assuming Billy was actually involved in the shooting, he had at least one accomplice – the guy who pulled the trigger. And if you have an accomplice, DeMarco reasoned, you have to communicate with him. Ergo, one looks at phone bills to see who Billy has been blabbing with lately.

DeMarco realized that if Billy Ray was a professional hit man or an undercover agent for a foreign government, his methods of communication would be more sophisticated than the kitchen telephone. But just looking at Billy Ray’s file, DeMarco was positive the man was not a mole the Russians had trained from birth, then parachuted into rural Georgia to work his way into the confidences of the American elite.

‘You know, it was a lot of work to get those records,’ Alice said to DeMarco as she stuffed peanuts in her mouth. To Mr William she yelled, ‘Hey, stilts! If it ain’t too much trouble, how ’bout another one here.’

‘Alice,’ DeMarco said, ‘who are you kidding? You hit maybe three keys on your keyboard to get this stuff.’

‘How would you know?’ Alice said. ‘You work for the phone company too, Mr Big Shot? Anyway, I’m a little short this month.’

Alice was a little short every month. DeMarco suspected the only thing keeping the loan shark’s bat from her wrinkled kneecaps was the monthly retainer he paid her.

As Alice droned on about the state of the economy in general and her personal finances in particular, DeMarco looked at Billy Mattis’s phone records. Alice’s computer had provided names and addresses of people and businesses Billy had called from his home phone and using his calling card. DeMarco would have Emma’s people check out the names to see if anyone was noteworthy, but nothing leaped out at him: no calls to businesses that made spotting scopes or sniper rifles – and most important, no calls to the late Harold Edwards.

The only strange thing he did find was that in June Billy had called a Jillian Mattis twenty times in a two-week period. Jillian Mattis, DeMarco remembered from Billy’s personnel file, was Billy’s mother. He looked at the previous month’s bill and saw that Billy had only called his mother four times. The high number of calls began two weeks after he had been assigned to the President’s security detail. DeMarco realized that Billy’s increased phone calls to his mother during this period could have a number of mundane explanations. Maybe she’d been sick around that time and he was just checking on her. Or maybe Billy was planning to visit her and was finalizing his plans. Or maybe Billy was a closet mama’s boy.

‘Well,’ Alice said.

‘Well what?’ DeMarco said. He hadn’t heard a word she’d said for the last five minutes.

‘Can you give me an advance?’

‘Yeah,’ DeMarco said. Giving in to Alice was easier than haggling with Alice. And Lord knows Trump could use the money.

Middleburg, Virginia, was fifty miles west of the capital, a picture-postcard of a town surrounded by rolling green hills that were once Civil War battlefields. The battlefields were now white-fenced pastures where well-bred horses pranced. Wealthy Washingtonians bought land near Middleburg, and on weekends attended steeplechases and pretended they were country squires.

Frank Engles was not a country squire; he owned a bed-and-breakfast. His establishment was a multihued Victorian with leaded-glass windows and sun-catching dormers and was as romantic as a bouquet of roses. It was the sort of place DeMarco might have chosen to take a girlfriend to spend a fall weekend – if he had a girlfriend.

DeMarco had told General Banks he needed to talk to someone who knew Billy and understood the Secret Service’s promotion practices. Banks had his people contact the Service’s human resources department and they very fortunately came up with Frank Engles. The very fortunate part was that just before he retired Engles had supervised Billy.

A plump, white-haired woman wearing an apron dusted with flour answered the doorbell. She told DeMarco he would find Engles behind the house doing some chores. He walked around the house as directed and saw a man in the backyard splitting wood. The man’s back was to DeMarco. Lying on the ground near the man was a dog.

DeMarco liked dogs that were cuddly and came only to his knee. The dog he was now looking at was a German shepherd the size of a Shetland pony and as cuddly as a polar bear. The beast’s head swiveled toward DeMarco like a gun turret, and then it gave a single yelp and charged. DeMarco, in turn, did what he always did when confronted by a hundred-and-twenty-pound canine moving in his direction with its teeth exposed: he stood completely still, tried to look unthreatening, and wished like hell he was armed.